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Last night, my friend and philosophical mentor former Cabinet Secretary and Republican Congressman Jack Kemp lost his battle with cancer and passed away. Bona Park, one of his staffers, told me that as recently as last Sunday that Jack had had a good day, but that his cancer had accelerated rapidly from Sunday through last night. Jack’s effusive optimism and evangelical belief in the power of free-market capitalism to create wealth and upward mobility for all Americans inspired a generation of conservatives. As I posted here it was Jack Kemp, more so than Ronald Reagan, who inspired me as a college student in the late 1970s and early 1980s to study economics and become involved in politics.

Jack was best known for championing supply-side economics, which transformed the Republican Party from a minority party of austerity in the 1970s to the majority party of opportunity and growth it became under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and beyond. But Jack was also an indefatigable champion for expanding freedom and democratic capitalism (with small “d” as he used to say) across the globe, for empowering the working poor in America’s distressed urban and rural communities, and for broadening the Republican Party’s appeal to African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities by bringing it back to the Party of Abraham Lincoln.

Jack Kemp was a great admirer of America’s 16th President. He had a bust of Abraham Lincoln that followed him from his Congressional office in the Rayburn Building to the Secretary’s office at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to HUD to his very modest office at Kemp Partners in downtown Washington D.C. In his last syndicated column in February, Jack Kemp wrote a glowing tribute to Abraham Lincoln, in which he describes “Lincoln’s view of the ‘American ideal’ – that the principles enunciated in America's Declaration of Independence are universal, and that freedom is not just for some people, but for all people, and not just for one time, but for all time.”

Kemp further writes: “For Abraham Lincoln, true welfare meant not dependency, but well-being; not equality of reward, but equality of opportunity; not reliance on the state, but reliance on oneself and one's family. He wrote, prophetically, The progress by which the poor, honest, industrious and resolute man raises himself, that he may work on this own account and hire somebody else ... is the great principle for which this government was really formed.’” Kemp cites another quote from Lincoln, which provides some lessons for today: "I don't believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. ... I want every man to have the chance -- and I believe a black man is entitled to it -- in which he can better his condition -- when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system."

Jack Kemp, lived the American Dream, growing up in Los Angeles, California in the 1940s and 1950s, where his father turned a motorcycle messenger service into a trucking company that grew from one to fourteen trucks. He became a professional football quarterback leading his teams to two American Football League championships in the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, he led the Republican Party to the majority through the power of his ideas. Today’s Republicans can learn much from Jack Kemp’s progressive conservative or “Lincolnesque” philosophy as they look for ways to become relevant again.

For me, Jack was an inspiration, a mentor and a friend. I will miss him greatly.

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